Search Engine Alternatives to Google

Now a lot of affiliates are saying Google hates affiliates, and based on what happened with the Penguin update and Panda updates, one could argue that they do. As we all know, not all affiliate sites are poor quality, thin content farms spammed to the top with links.

Let’s say you were hit, and you don’t have the budget to compete in Google anymore… What do you do now?

Go to other search engines! And, no, I don’t mean Bing or Yahoo! I mean Yandex, Baidu and Naver. (I’m not going to talk about Naver too much as it’s very complicated and really requires a blog post to itself so I’ll get to that next week.) The first issue some of you will be worrying about is content, but getting Chinese, Russian and Korean content produced is relatively cheap.

If you’re not afraid to explore some new markets and search engines, then here is the basic comparison to Google for the two search engines.

Baidu SEO

• Penguin hasn’t happened here yet. In fact, you can still get away with the sort of link spam you did back in 2005. In other words, it’s still very much a quantity game over there. Now this is not a long-term strategy, because we can only assume that a Penguin is coming, but in the meantime…
• Content is KING. No, really, Baidu is really fussy when it comes to content. Use simplified Chinese, not traditional. Also, Panda has happened, so be aware of this.
• Meta still counts. Yup, that includes the keywords too, so there’s a nice quick win.
• Formatting around your Keywords still gives you a boost, and Baidu loves internal linking in content.
• Chinese hosting and domains will also give you a larger boost than localized hosting and domains would in Google.
• Whilst it isn’t ideal for Baidu in theory, creating URLs in PInYin is good for users and you should probably do this.
• In terms of social, it’s all about Weibo and Baidu Share, so this is where you need to be focusing.
• Remember Baidu’s spider is a little less sophisticated than Google’s and it’s Chinese is much more difficult for it to read. Make life easy for it and keep your code clean. Also, make sure your site health is up to scratch. (That means tidying dead pages, dead links and so on).

Yandex SEO

• TIC = PR. Now the difference is TIC actually matters when you’re building links.
• There will NEVER be a Penguin Penalty Equivalent. Yandex is doing what Google should’ve done and simply devaluing the spam.
• Again, get your content right. In fact that Yandex likes decided what data it should put in your snippet based on your sites content means that if you expect CTR to be good make sure all your content is good.
• Yandex is a grammar Nazi, make sure the quality of Russian is impeccable.
• High end directories and Press Releases still carry weight; Yandex Catelog and Mail.ru’s directory are worth getting in.
• Anchor text ratios need to be spread, but Yandex is much more lenient than Google.
• Your site health is very important much like Baidu.
• Yandex has Panda .It hates duplicate content and keyword stuffing.
• You can’t really spam to the top of Yandex anymore, but it is isn’t going to cripple you for making mistakes in three years time.